"When In Rome" review

“When In Rome” is freaking hilarious! I watched this movie last night with John while I was, well..a little tipsy (thanks for the great night Lyn! – I still can’t believe we drove around singing Bad Romance..too funny!! ). 

This movie has the smirky sense of someone at a party who’s had a bit too much to drink and who laughs too hard at his/her own jokes, killing even the ones that are clever. 

It doesn't make sense that Kristen Bel (Beth) should have trouble finding a date with a decent guy.. She, or any character she plays, should have eligible bachelors beating down her door. In this movie, creakily contrived romantic comedy, she does. All started with her trip to Rome for her sister Joan’s wedding.

Beth- drunk and unhappy – steals five coins from a Fountain of love and drags back to New York with her the spell-induced affections of the four annoying males who tossed those coins into the fountain in the first place. 

Those annoying males comes in the form of a street magician, a painter, a wanna-be model and a sausage entrepreneur.  None of these dudes is really smitten with Beth at all. Instead, all four are under some kind of magic spell resulting from the fact that Beth removed coins they threw into a fountain in Rome -- a wishing fountain said to bring love to those who toss a bit of change into it, but also said to curse anyone who steals a coin by making the coin's owner fall madly in love with the thief.

 

Of course at the same time, Beth is also pursued by Nick, a charming sportswriter she met at the wedding, and for whom she's also starting to develop a few warm, squishy feelings of her own. After she learns about the curse, she comes to believe that Nick, like the others, is merely bewitched and that he doesn't actually like her. 

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t exactly care about Beth’s career ambitions—why she’s good at what she does or why she likes doing it. Suffice it to say, as she does more than once, that she’s looking for a man she can love more than her job. Until then, she’s married to it, and not only occasionally miserable about that life choice. 

Anyway, I thought it was a cute movie, even though I predicted that one of the coins(poker chip) wasn’t Nick’s. It was light-hearted and fun.